VoC: What’s Wrong With VoC and How Do You Get It Right? (Part I)

May 10, 2012

I like the folks at Mindshare Technologies – specialists in customer surveys and enterprise feedback. We share a philosophy, YOLOMAD: you only live once, make a difference. From what I can tell they are passionate about helping companies to get access to the Voice of the Customer and use that to improve the customer experience and cultivate customer loyalty that delivers revenues and profits.

With that context in mind reached out to Erich Dietz, VP of Business Solutions to get his view on VoC stands – the reality and not hype or commentary. Before I do that let me tell you a little about Erich. Mindshare started up in Nov 2002 and Erich joined in January 2003; Mindshare has over 250 clients and around 105 employees - Erich was employee no 7. And he runs on of the key verticals: the contact centre vertical. He has a degree in industrial engineering and so has a penchant for finding a better way to do stuff. When he worked as a barman he had intimate contact with people so you could say that he understands people – perhaps better than some of us.

What’s the big issue with how companies are going about Voice of the Customer?

You may have noticed that has been a backlash about customer survey. It appears that customers and people who write about customer related topics like customer service and customer experience have had enough – it has got to the state where requests for customer surveys are having a negative impact on the Customer Experience!

What does Erich say about that? Erich gets the issue. He is also clear that VoC, done right, can and does create value for customers and the enterprise – Mindshare has the data to prove it. Which begs the question: what is the key issue with VoC? Why are so many companies not doing it right? Here’s what Erich says:

“No-one is really doing VoC surveys with the customer in mind!”

By this he is pointing out the following:

1. Customers are not given an incentive to take part in the surveying process. Put differently, the question “What would entice our customers to give up their time and provide us with valuable feedback?” is not being addressed. Erich’s view is that a monetary incentive should be provided to kick start ‘engagement’ with the customer.

3. Companies are not showing customers what they are doing / have done with the feedback. Customers want to know that they are not wasting their time providing their feedback. Customers also want to see the changes that have been made – that their feedback can/does make an impact in the way that the company does business. Enterprises are not providing this feedback – not at the individual customer level nor at the aggregate level – and as such not meeting a vital customer need.

Why is this happening? What is the root cause?

OK, I get the issue now tell me what is giving rise to this behaviour? That is the question I posed and this is Erich’s answer: companies do not get VoC is about engaging customers in a meaningful dialogue (around the customer experience) and not simply surveying customers!

This led me to ask this question, why are companies approaching VoC as customer surveying rather than a meaningful dialogue around the customer experience? Here is Erich’s answer:

1. There is an existing strong tradition of surveying customers. This traditions comes for the marketing world – that of surveying customers and/or holding focus groups. In both cases the research is expensive to set-up and do and so companies are intent to get the most out of this research. As such companies (and researchers) see customers as a valuable captive audience and want to get as much out of them as possible – hence the battery of questions that strive to ask about anything and everything that might be useful.

2. There is no tradition and accepted practice around engaging in a genuine dialogue with customers. Exploring this further, Erich and I agreed that there isn’t even any genuine dialogue within the enterprise – between the manager and the people that report into him, between colleagues, between one department and another….. In short companies run on a ‘command and control’ mode and in that mode there is no room, no space, no opening for dialogue, discussion, batting things back and forth. In ‘command and control’ the Tops decide, the Middles relay the orders, the Bottoms execute. And this is exactly what is happening with VoC.

Part II coming next

In Part II (coming next and soon) I will share with you Erich’s views on the second critical issue with VoC – getting value out of it! I will close this series with Part III, where I will set out Erich’s recommendations on how to do VoC right and get value out of it. I thank you for listening to my speaking.